AS A PRINTMAKER, Leah Jachimowicz's greeting cards are colorful and quirky, with playful messages like "Drink me" accompanying a martini glass or "Bite me" with a cupcake.

But the artwork the San Francisco resident has hanging at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station through June 9 is nothing like her cards. Instead, the prints and mixed-media collages in "Reliquaries for the Materials Inside" speak to the horrors of war and the Holocaust, but also of survival.

Her late grandparents, Nathan and Ester Jachimowicz, met and married after World War II, after he was liberated from Dachau and she from Stutow. They moved to San Francisco, where they opened a tailoring and dry-cleaning shop, started a family and rebuilt their life.

"I kind of had a morbid curiosity about the Holocaust all through my childhood. It's so funny because I'm not even really sure of the reason why; I just knew that's what I needed to do," the 31-year-old says of her art.

Most of the artworks at the GRO exhibit were part of her MFA thesis at San Francisco's Academy of Art. They incorporate the things that surrounded her grandfather in his Sunset district shop — fabric, safety pins, bobbins, needles, thread, tape measures and buttons. Not only do they represent his life, but they also are a metaphor of how survivors mended their lives after so much loss and pain.

Jachimowicz continues to make new works that explore that theme, and the impact her grandparents' experience had on her father and herself.

"I'm trying to get it closer to me. People say, 'You're a third generation, and this is your grandparents' story.' I'm trying to get it to be more of my voice," she says.

Printmaking is the perfect medium to do that, she believes.

"In printmaking, the print is removed from the original design, so it's sort of like a metaphor for how I didn't experience it, but it's still a part of me and my life experience," she says.

It's hard for her to ignore the sense of sadness that was so much a part of her grandparents' life. That's why her cards are so whimsical and light, says Jachimowicz, whose letterpress card business is called Coffee n Cream Press.

"That's how I avert and avoid the sadness. That's how I am," she says. "As I go deeper into the things that are really, really meaningful to me, that's when you can feel that coming out, that awareness, the sadness, loss, the heartache."

Jachimowicz's work was lucky enough to be noticed by San Rafael's Eleanor Murray, who organizes the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art's annual altered book show. Jachimowicz participated in it for the first time last year. Murray suggested to GRO that Jachimowicz would be a good fit for the gallery's annual Far From Home exhibit.

"People really like it. It's something really special," says Vickisa Feinberg, a Bolinas artist who does PR for the gallery, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. "Far from Home is about artists that are connected to another place, and for her it's definitely a part of her art."

Jachimowicz is in the process of moving into her grandparents' home to live as well as set up her printmaking studio and office. She knows that will likely influence whatever new work she creates.

"I have memorabilia there. It's inspiring," she says. "That was another thing I wanted to get through; they did survive."

Vicki Larson can be reached at vlarson@marinij.com; follow her on Twitter at @OMGchronicles, fan her on Facebook at Vicki-Larson-OMG-Chronicles